Favorite Contacts Custom Widget Brings Your Favorites To iOS 5 Notification Center
We’ve already seen a number of useful custom widgets for iOS 5 Notification Center such as BBSettings, Music Center, SpringPrefs, UISettings etc even before iOS 5 was officially available for jailbreakers.
Ever since iOS 5 has been released, we’re seeing a flood of third party custom widgets for iOS 5 Notification Center. The first one we are going to cover is Favorite Contacts.
As the name suggests, the Favorite Contacts custom widget brings your favorite contacts from the Phone book to iOS 5 Notification Center, thus making it a lot easier to call your favorite contacts from any application rather than going through the hassle of exiting the current app and launching the Phone app.
You can choose to display the names and the contacts pictures of your favorite contacts. When you tap on the contact icons in iOS 5 Notification Center, you get an option to either call, message or email the contact.
You can configure the settings for the jailbreak custom widget via the Settings app.
Checkout some of the screenshots of the Favorite custom widget below:
First iPhone 4S TV commercial features Siri [VIDEO]
The first iPhone 4S ad has aired on TV and very prominently features Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant exclusive to Apple’s newest handset.
The ad shows several people talking to their iPhones, asking questions, looking up directions, setting up reminders — all in very natural language. Siri itself doesn’t appear until near the end of the video, though, so people who’ve never heard of the feature before may find this commercial somewhat confusing at first.
We’ve embedded a version of the commercial below (hat tip to Engadget) that someone filmed off their TV. The official ad hasn’t shown up on Apple’s site or its YouTube channel as of this writing, so we’ll update this post later on when it does.
Steve Jobs Biography: “I’m Going To Destroy Android, Because It’s A Stolen Product”
The unfortunate death of Steve Jobs, Apple’s former CEO who succumbed to pancreatic cancer some two weeks ago, has led an inevitable surge in the interest in his first (and only) official biography, compiled by Walter Isaacson.
With the release date having been pushed forward, sales are expected to be huge, and it would indeed be a fitting tribute if it were competing sales wise with the iPhone 4S – the latest protégé of Jobs’ legacy.
Indeed, the anticipation level – which has gotten Sony keen to seal the rights for a motion picture – is comparable to that of an iPhone or iPad release, right down to the bootleggers in China keepin’ it real fake and excerpts leaking earlier than the release date. Sound familiar?
The leaks insight Jobs’ relationship with Jony Ive, the fruit company’s head of product design, whom he described as his “spiritual partner” with “more operation power” at Apple than anybody besides himself.
Indeed, Apple has been set up in such a way that design is the focal point, so Jobs and Ive’s internal allegiance has always been central to that. One suspects that if Apple is to maintain the design flair and innovation post-Jobs, Ive will need to be central to that.
How to type “comma” using Siri
Steve Sande and I have been collaborating on “Talking to Siri,” an ebook that will soon hit the Kindle store.
It’s a how-to that will help you get the most done with your Siri intelligent assistant.
One of the questions that people keep asking us is “how do I spell out the word ‘comma’ or ‘period’,” in other words, how do you dictate the literal word instead of punctuation.
Fortunately, there is a solution for this. It’s not a clean solution or an easy one, but it can be done. To type out comma, for example, you dictate no caps on, no space on, C O M M A, no space off, no caps off.
This tells Siri to start a forced lower-case mode without spaces. You then spell out the word in question (comma, here). At the end, you return to normal dictation mode by disabling that mode.
First music video shot with the iPhone 4S [VIDEO]
A band called The Turnback nabbed a few iPhone 4Ses as quickly as they could, and scheduled a music video shoot right around launch, opting to be the first to fire off a music video using just the iPhone 4S and its new HD camera.
As you can see below, it looks pretty good — not quite as good as a full HD video, I think, but not bad. For a phone camera, it’s great.
The video was even shot in the new 1080p mode, and was cut together on Final Cut Pro. As a proof of concept, at least, it works, and it shows that aside from all of the splashy news around Siri, the camera adds yet another nice feature to the latest and greatest iPhone.
